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La ruta de Lorca
On June 5, the birthday of the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, I joined LA RUTA DE LORCA EN NUEVA YORK, a walking tour of some of the poet’s haunts in the vicinity of Columbia University. We gathered at the university gate, bearing as our standard a rendering of Lorca’s face, composed,…
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Pedro Giraudo
It is not just his “big” band. Everything about the music of Pedro Giraudo is vast, enlarged in space, time and ambition, extended to the far-off horizons that the sounds he makes compel us to visualize. His compositions feel as though they traverse landscapes, squeezing whole journeys into musical adventures that set out as from…
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Murder Ballad
The transition into theatrical time is seamlessly accomplished at the start of MURDER BALLAD. I was taking in the scene, watching the couples at the tables, the bartender cleaning off the counter, the waiters circulating, when I suddenly noticed in one of the pre-show photos that I was snapping that someone was sitting on the…
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Old Hats
I believe that any respectable dictionary must include as one of the definitions of “sui generis” the words “Nellie McKay”. Has anyone encountered anywhere another such being, so precocious, eccentric, old-timey, modern, sweet, caustic, irreverent, generous, unforgiving, feminine, feminist, brilliant, faux naïve, and Nellie-knows-how-many-other qualities that I can’t begin to put my finger on? Is…
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Sonia M’Barek
Some of the most interesting cultural programming in New York is presented by the French Institute Alliance Française, and this month is no exception. WORLD NOMADS 2013: TUNISIA is featuring dance, music, the visual arts, and film from the former French colony, some of it addressing the politics of the Arab spring and issues of…
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Jazz and Sushi
The Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet is an important band, and it should not come as a surprise that no smallish house in which they perform will be unpacked. It has doubtless happened before, but Saturday’s concert – of two separately vended sets – was the first time I have seen a full house at the…
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Sara Serpa
I’ve heard good report of the Portuguese vocalist Sara Serpa for a while now, and I finally heard her live on Friday night. Her genre is jazz, but do not expect to hear the standards from her, at least not in their usual form. Serpa is an experimentalist, and an intellectual, and her repertory includes…
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Two Pianists
I had the occasion this month to attend two classical piano recitals, one by a world-class artist at Carnegie Hall, and the other by a knowledgeable and evidently skilled specialist in the Spanish repertory at the Village redoubt that calls itself (le) poussin rouge. It would be presumptuous to comment on the finer points of…
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Ana Moura
The title of Ana Moura’s new collection is DESFADO, and I take that to mean, without knowing Portuguese, that it is fado, but not, or fado but at an angle, askew; or perhaps it means to be taken by fado, touched by it as by madness, kidnapped by its pirate lilt and stirred by its…
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Iris Dement
I have changed since last I heard Iris Dement live, sometime in the late ‘90s soon after the release of what, until now, was her last album of original songs. She was for me in that decade the premier artist of that conglomeration of bluegrass, gospel, country, acoustic protest, blues, and anthemic individualism that we…